Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Virginia Woolf's purse
- 2 Algeria: a world constructed out of ruins
- 3 Yugoslavia: archetype or anomaly?
- 4 Chechnya: virgins, mothers, and terrorists
- 5 Québec: oui, no, or femme
- 6 “To live to see better times”: gender, nationalism, sovereignty, equality
- Index
- References
3 - Yugoslavia: archetype or anomaly?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- 1 Virginia Woolf's purse
- 2 Algeria: a world constructed out of ruins
- 3 Yugoslavia: archetype or anomaly?
- 4 Chechnya: virgins, mothers, and terrorists
- 5 Québec: oui, no, or femme
- 6 “To live to see better times”: gender, nationalism, sovereignty, equality
- Index
- References
Summary
Both politicians and private citizens search for scapegoats and ways to differentiate in the distribution of scarce resources, such as jobs, among citizens with equal rights. The most likely result of this scapegoating in Yugoslavia is always a rise in nationalist antagonisms … nationalist incidents, religious revival, and antifeminist backlash.
Susan Woodward, 1986If women fail to participate in bringing political decisions and in defending their rights, I am afraid that democracy in Eastern Europe will be of masculine gender. And, what is worse, it will wear boots.
Slavenka Drakulić, 1991The wars that attended the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s brought issues of gender and violence to the front page of newspapers and on to television screens. Nationalist rhetoric justified policies of violent “ethnic cleansing” that included organized campaigns of mass rape and other sexual atrocities as a core part of the strategy. The association of nationalism with violence against women seemed to fit very well Virginia Woolf's contention that nationalism was a mainly male sentiment, fostered by a system of discrimination against women. One study of female survivors of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina reflected Woolf's basic argument in its very title: This Was Not Our War. Even more to the point was the title of Cynthia Enloe's insightful essay on the making of a Serbian rapist: “All the Men are in the Militias, All the Women are Victims.” By putting it so starkly, Enloe deliberately raises questions about the merits of such broad generalizations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gender, Nationalism, and WarConflict on the Movie Screen, pp. 80 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011